All Scheduled Events

May 24, 2013 Friday 11:00 AM 
Meyer 5th Fl. CCPP Lounge
Other CCPP (ccpp)

AstroCoffee

informal discussion of recent astro papers

May 24, 2013 Friday 2:30 PM 
719 Broadway, Room 1221
Other CCPP (ccpp)

VLG Seminar
Bill Freeman
MIT

Re-rendering motions: motion denoising and motion magnification

I'll describe two projects at the intersection of vision and graphics. (1) Motion denoising processes a video to remove the flickering motions common in time-lapse sequences, while revealing the long term changes. We define a cost function for rearrangments of the pixels over time and space to favor the desired processing, and use loopy belief propagation to find an approximate solution. (2) Motion magnification amplifies small motions to make them more visible. For this we use a multi-scale signal processing approach, which can be applied in real time. The magnified motions can reveal "a big world of tiny motions", showing properties of the world not otherwise visible. Both two techniques can be applied to videos of any temporal sampling rate, but motion denoising is best suited to timelapse sequences, while motion magnification matches works best for higher sampling rates (ordinary or high-speed videos).

May 28, 2013 Tuesday 11:00 AM 
Meyer 5th Fl. CCPP Lounge
Other CCPP (ccpp)

AstroCoffee

informal discussion of recent astro papers

May 31, 2013 Friday 11:00 AM 
Meyer 5th Fl. CCPP Lounge
Other CCPP (ccpp)

AstroCoffee

informal discussion of recent astro papers

June 5, 2013 Wednesday 2:00 PM 
Meyer 5th Fl. CCPP Lounge
Other CCPP (ccpp)

Informal HEP Talk
Vincent Vennin
IAP, Paris

Inflationary models under the scope of Planck

An unprecedented opportunity to constrain the inflationary theory is provided by the current flow of high accuracy astrophysical data, among which are the Cosmic Microwave Background measurements by the Planck satellite. This is however a challenging project given the size of the inflationary landscape which contains hundreds of different scenarios. A reasonable approach is to consider the simplest models first, namely the slow-roll single field models with minimal kinetic terms, unless the data drive us to more complicated ones. This still leaves us with a very populated landscape, the exploration of which requires new and efficient strategies. Recently the publicly available runtime library ASPIC has been developed to implement this approach, providing all routines needed to quickly derive reheating consistent observable predictions for each of the ~70 models within this class of scenarios. In this talk I will present the status of this evolutive project, ultimately aimed at ranking the inflationary models by means of Bayesian inference. Depending on schedule, I will also show the first results of Bayesian evidences and posteriors for these models.

June 5, 2013 Wednesday 2:00 PM 
Meyer 6th Floor Conference Room
Soft Condensed Matter Seminars (csmr)

Florent Krzakala
ESPCI

TBA

June 19, 2013 Wednesday 2:00 PM 
Meyer 5th Fl. CCPP Lounge
Other CCPP (ccpp)

Special HEP Seminar
Sergio Ferrara
CERN

Duality, Black Holes and Groups of Type E7

June 26, 2013 Wednesday 2:00 PM 
Meyer 5th Fl. CCPP Lounge
Other CCPP (ccpp)

Special HEP Seminar
Antonio Grassi
University of Piemonte Orientale

Integral Forms, Entropy Current and Thermodynamics

October 9, 2013 Wednesday 2:00 PM 
Meyer 5th Fl. CCPP Lounge
High Energy Physics Seminars (hep)

Alexander Vilenkin
Tufts

TBA

October 16, 2013 Wednesday 2:00 PM 
Meyer 611
Hard Condensed Matter Seminars (hcmp)

Louis Bouchard
UCLA

Nanoscale Studies of Electronic and Magnetic Properties in Topological Materials

In recent years the emergence of gapless topologically protected edge states in the solid state has led to searches for new phases of condensed matter in new and existing materials. For example, some thermoelectrics and Kondo insulators have been shown to be topological insulators. The protected edge states in topological insulators are due to the combination of spin-orbit coupling and time-reversal invariance. Examples of exotic phenomena include the quantum anomalous Hall effect, fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect, topological superconductor, fractional time-reversal invariance, topological Kondo insulator, topological crystalline insulator and the topological magneto-electric effect. However, the interesting properties of topological materials are found at edges and interfaces, making them challenging to study from the experimental standpoint. In this talk, we will review recent advances in experimental techniques to study the electronic and magnetic properties of such topological materials. Among the novel techniques, we shall discuss radioactive ion beam spectroscopy, electrically-detected electron spin resonance and nuclear magnetic resonance.
Our group has been carrying out experiments at TRIUMF using low energy spin-polarized muon and lithium ion beams to resolve properties as function of depth, with nanoscale resolution. Such studies reveal substantial modulations of the material properties at these length scales, which could have implications in the design of devices and in the search for new phases. Studies of material defects in the bulk will also be discussed. Results from these ongoing experiments as well as other experiments will be discussed. Ultimately, the development of new experimental methods is expected to lead to not only insight for improving material properties but may also enable the development of composite materials with optimized properties.

November 22, 2013 Friday 2:00 PM 
Meyer 5th Fl. CCPP Lounge
Astrophysics and Relativity Seminars (astro)

Adi Zolotov
Ohio State University

TBA